Tag: orcas

Chunsam, with her freeze brand #2 sorta visible, enjoys life back in the wild.

As the public becomes more aware of the ethical issue involved with keeping dolphins and killer whales captive, and public sentiment about captivity changes, the question of whether captive dolphins and killer whales can successfully be released back into the wild is increasingly relevant.

While there have been many releases of captive dolphins, there have been relatively few releases of long-term show dolphins, and even fewer that were fully documented. In recent years, however, two bottlenose dolphins (named Tom and Misha) were successfully released back into the Aegean, and three bottlenose dolphins (Jedol, Chunsam, and Sampal) were successfully released off Jeju Island, South Korea. All had spent years in marine parks, yet managed to learn what they needed to learn to survive again in the ocean.

Both releases were carefully documented, during and after release, and show what can be achieved, even with dolphins that have suffered greatly in captivity. My story about these dolphins, and the question of captive release, was just published at National Geographic.

Here’s the start:

In early January 2011 Jeff Foster, a 55-year-old marine mammal expert from Seattle, arrived on the stony shore of a pristine bay near the small village of Karaca, situated in a corner of the Gulf of Gökova on Turkey’s southwest coast. Just offshore was a collection of floating pens used to farm fish. In one of them, which had been modified and measured about a hundred feet across and 50 feet deep, two male bottlenose dolphins swam in slow circles.

Tom and Misha, as they were called, were in lamentable condition. As far as anyone could tell, they’d been captured in the Aegean sometime in 2006, and almost nothing was known about their lives in the wild. After starting their captive lives at a dolphin park in the seaside town of Kaş, they’d been trucked a short distance inland in June 2010 to a crudely constructed concrete pool in the mountain town of Hisarönü so that tourists could pay $50 for the chance to grab their dorsal fins and get a ten-minute tow. Hisarönü consists mainly of cheap hotels and bars with suggestive names like Oh Yes! and thumping late-night music. It would be hard to imagine a more incongruous or disorienting location for two ocean-born dolphins. An inadequate filtration system quickly left the bottom of their pool carpeted with dead fish and dolphin feces.

Within weeks, an outraged grassroots and social media campaign organized by dolphin-loving locals had forced the place to close. In early September, amid fears that the dolphins would soon die, the U.K.-based Born Free Foundation, which is dedicated to the protection of animals in the wild, stepped in and took possession of Tom and Misha. The two dolphins were bundled into a refrigerated meat truck lined with old mattresses and transported to the pen off Karaca. Foster was hired to help Born Free attempt something truly ambitious: restore Tom and Misha to peak physical condition, teach them what they would need to know to live as wild dolphins again, and release them back into the Aegean. “It is extremely high risk with a creature that is not predictable and easy,” says Will Travers, Born Free’s president. “But we realized that there were very few options for them, and they were likely to die unless somebody did something.”

You can read the whole thing here. And there is a great photo gallery here. Hope you find it interesting.

Last week, Karl Taro Greenfeld managed an unusual feat: he was allowed inside SeaWorld’s corporate offices to interview SeaWorld’s leadership and report a Businessweek story called “Saving SeaWorld,” about SeaWorld’s efforts to survive and bounce back from the surprisingly powerful and accelerating #BlackfishEffect (seriously, I think it is fair to say that no one involved with the production fully anticipated the impact that resulted).

Since this is the first real access SeaWorld has given a big-time news organization since Blackfish started cratering SeaWorld’s image, its corporate relationships, and its stock price, it is worth taking a close look at what Greenfeld reported.

“There is no recipe to follow. There’s very little intuitive about it,” says Atchison. “Do I wish we would have taken a more aggressive action earlier? On an emotional level I do, because I was offended by it personally. … One of the things we had to measure early on was, how do we engage in it? We don’t want to aid the marketing of the film by engaging too openly, too aggressively, too early. We didn’t want to turn it into the film SeaWorld doesn’t want you to see. And the film didn’t really gain any kind of notable momentum until CNN started airing it. Repeatedly.”

I have to admit that I am sympathetic to SeaWorld on this point. SeaWorld had a long history of keeping its head down when bad things happen at its parks, and the bad news always blew away over time and allowed SeaWorld to get back to business. It is completely understandable that SeaWorld did not want to make a big deal out of Blackfish before Blackfish was, indeed, a big deal. Why help the public take notice of a film that will harm your business?

And Atchison is correct, I think, that the CNN airings are what blew Blackfish up into a public phenomenon (an important lesson to all film-makers who want their work to have impact). Following Sundance, and through the film’s theatrical run, there was just not that much public awareness about Blackfish. I have never been in the loop on the theatrical numbers, but I don’t think Blackfish was packing the movie houses. It wasn’t until Blackfish hit cable television, on CNN in late October (along with a pretty good CNN-designed social media plan) that lots and lots of people saw Blackfish and started telling others about it.

Over the past month I’ve been digging into the lives of former SeaWorld Animal Care workers, and publishing their stories (here, here, and here). Many of their experiences seem shocking to people unfamiliar with animal care work, and how difficult it can be. And it is easy to see how the stories can fuel an anti-SeaWorld sentiment.

Jim Horton, one of the three former Animal Care workers I interviewed, was troubled by the vehemence and hardcore anti-SeaWorld nature of some of the comments he saw posted to social media in the aftermath of the stories (big mistake, to read comments, I explained). And also by the fact that many of the stories published in the Animal Care series focus on the negative aspects of the lives of the workers and the nature of managing animals in captivity.

Animal Care obviously includes a lot of positive experiences, where animals are nurtured, rescued, or saved. And the thing I admire most about the Animal Care workers I spoke with and wrote about is that they did the work–with all the good, the bad and the ugly–because they cared first and foremost about the animals. They weren’t there to become Shamu Stadium stars. They were there because they loved animals and wanted to care for them. Eventually, especially for Krissy Dodge and Cynthia Payne, the nature of the work, and the way in which captivity compromised the lives of the animals, forced them to step away and pursue other careers. But the point is that Animal Care work, and the emotions and realities involved, is not at all simple. How Animal Care workers feel about the work they do, especially post-Blackfish, is an intensely complex subject, and that didn’t always come across in the articles I published.

So in order to dig deeper into what Jim Horton felt and feels about the work he did, and how Blackfish opened up many difficult questions, I am posting (with Jim’s permission) a letter that he wrote to a friend. In it, Jim explores and articulates the powerful and conflicting emotions he feels about the work. And if you want to judge him or Animal Care workers harshly, as so many were quick to do, I only ask that you make sure you read this letter first:

Dear ……,

I feel your pain. I think the movie Blackfish and it’s flock of anti captivity followers has made us all take a deep look inside at what we have done over the years and where we are now emotionally in our careers as animal care takers. Torn between our love of the animals we have come to know and the public outcry from those that have never experienced what we have, with the exception of a few. I find it very ironic that the world of those we entertained and taught priceless educational values to are now claiming injustices and untruths that rock the very core of our souls, creating gaps and even bitterness between our friends, co workers and family.

I’m sure you can recall as I can the hundreds of times we were told by the public, family and friends that we must have the greatest job in the world. I recall, later on in my career, often scoffing at that comment and explaining to those that would listen, that this career is a labor of love and full of extreme highs and extreme lows and at times can very well be the worst job in the world. Those people, the ones looking from the outside in, so-called experts by the very knowledge that we as teachers have taught them, through the media and personal interactions, have no idea what it was like and also what it is like now.

What they don’t know and what the media never found newsworthy is the extreme duress we’ve gone through. The news only covers the animal’s story, not ours. The nights on end of watching, medicating, note-taking of sick animals. Every 3 hour tube feedings, injections and enemas, standing alone in poop-filled pools in freezing temperatures to bottle feed baby manatees or baby dolphins, while those around us celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, forgetting their anti-captivity rhetoric, while we shiver through the night, tired and hungry in the middle of a 24-hour shift doing everything you can to save a creature who has put all of it’s trust into us. Knowing fare well that if you screw up, fall asleep standing up, or miss a subtle cue of distress that this beautiful creature may die. They have not experienced the pain of watching and the feeling of the last heartbeat and breath of a dolphin, sea lion, or manatee dying in your arms, looking you straight in the eye as if to say help me or thank you, and in those final moments only you can decipher the final thoughts before death. You begin to cry if you’re alone there in the dark and cowboy up if you’re surrounded by peers, only to let it out in the seat of your car in your employers parking lot at the end of a very long day. You sit and ponder in anguish at what you could have done differently to save this one and what you can do the next time. You celebrate their life by helping the next one of their species.

Unless you’ve done it, one could never understand what it’s like to cut open and remove the brains and eyes of an animal you’ve cared for all it’s life. Sure, you put on your scientist mask, bundle up all of your emotions and swallow them like a big nasty pill and commence to do your job in the efforts of science and discovery and the personal need to know why. Your internal emotions and feelings of sadness, images of the happier times with this animal run through your veins in the form of liquid courage and it takes all of your might to carry on stoically. Hoping to find that smoking gun, that reason for not surviving your treatment. You hope to see the worst, a cancer, an infected kidney, inoperable stomach blockage or a brain abnormality. Often we find nothing and spend the rest of the evening wondering what went wrong and what could you have done differently. The thoughts haunt you through the night as your friends and family wonder why you’re so despondent and can’t sleep or why you aren’t in the mood to eat that piece of steak. Our reward is to move on to the next case unless you are one of the unfortunate ones that has to make that trip the following day to the rendering factory to dispose of the carcass and once again, feel those emotions as you toss a head that you’ve hugged a thousand times into a vat of guts while dodging the spray of nastiness.

They will never know the pain of the animal bites, the broken bones, contusions, sprains, cortisone injections, IV fluids, stitches, ear infections and the unfortunate times you had vomit, the diarrhea and the long dead animal guts and maggots fly into your eyes and mouth.

They will never know the disappointment and the emptiness you cast upon your families with missed vacations and birthdays and the wonderment by those you love that can’t understand why you lack emotion at the death of a family pet or when you make an early decision to put the animal to sleep, knowing early on the inevitable suffering that prolonging death can create.

They will never know what that final rub down, that saying of I’m sorry, what that pat on the back of an animal feels like when you are getting ready to inject a life ending medication in an upwelling of humbleness and hopelessness, a surrender of effort of all your skills to prevent suffering.

They will never know the terror and horror, the sounds and images of being in a rescue van or cage or pool when an animal goes through its death throes. Flailing about in a final fit of uncontrollable rage, sending humans, skin and blood flying through the air, destroying everything in it’s path and then the sudden unexpected feeling of what was once hope comes crashing to the ground in a matter of seconds.

They will never know the many times we came very closed to being killed, mauled, drowned, or losing a limb, toe or finger or co worker in the efforts of just doing our job, you know, the one that is the greatest one in the world?

And so now were are forced to believe by many that this isn’t the greatest job in the world, that all that we’ve done, all of the pain and effort, tireless nights and trips to the hospital is a bad thing. They say our animals are treated poorly, our facilities are substandard, and we should be ashamed. Ironically, in a much misinformed manner, these foul cries of care seemed limited to the United States, where the best care in the world is provided. Having transported animals all over the world, I have truly seen the atrocities of animal care in third world countries. But that’s ok I guess, because we only believe what we see and fail to listen to the real experts. Untouchable they are the third world facilities, look at Taji. Those animals are captured and slaughtered every year, yet there are more outcries regarding a little blonde haired girl blowing a whistle–feeding and rubbing down an animal that she truly loves and will give her all with great sacrifice to her life and those around her in an effort to give that animal a good life- than the cries of slaughter. The paths we chose in the animal industry we didn’t always chase. We started as education staff, operations staff, cigarette butt picker up’ers, scuba divers and bucket washers. Suddenly, we were given the opportunity to be closer than most to these wonderful creatures. I’m sure there isn’t a soul in the business who hasn’t stated that “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this”. So innocent and inexperienced, having no idea that this journey will take you through a river of emotions, good and bad and that those children that you teach and share the joy of making a connection to animals, those children will grow up to say what you are doing, the efforts that you made, were not in the animals’ best interest.

I can truly say that I am against captivity and I am for captivity. I think perhaps, maybe it’s time to end Killer Whales in Captivity, but why not the elephants? I don’t really see the need anymore, we’ve learned about all we can. On the other hand, if it were not for having killer whales in captivity, who would have freed Willy? Who would have rescued, rehabilitated and released Springer? Who would have flown to Turkey for 2 years of their life to train captive dolphins to be wild again and set them free? Who of you out there are planning and watching every day the case of Morgan the Killer whale in Spain. Who of you is experienced and ready to leave your family for years to train and release this little whale back to her family? Who is prepared to make real sacrifices other than spouting verbal diarrhea from your warm cozy couch with an I Pad……..We are!

We are the ones who still love our job, we love animals in our care more than our friends and our future. We are proud of our accomplishments, we do make a difference in the lives of others, we are tough as nails, we are not afraid, we can control our emotions, we can laugh in the face of adversity and we can succeed where others have never tried. We teach and train the animal caretakers of the future, there will always be a need for us. Who is going to save the beached animals of the future? Movie directors?

I am proud of who I am and those that I have helped have a better life. I am not part of the problem, I am the solution. I am an animal husbandry specialist and I will never stop caring.

There you have the conflicts, the pathos, and the doubts (and certainty) of animal care, all wrapped up into one deeply felt letter. I don’t criticize Animal Care workers. In my view they are doing their best, for the right reasons, in a captive entertainment model that is flawed and that I think needs to be reinvented. I reserve my skepticism and criticism for that model, not for the people who do their best to ease the lives of the animals trapped in that model. It is easy to say they shouldn’t do that work. But if they didn’t do you think the lives of the animals would be better or worse? I thought so.

While SeaWorld continues to dig its heels in – pointing out that tens of thousands of visitors are in its parks right now – others are responding more progressively. In 2012 the National Aquarium in Baltimore, a highly regarded institution synonymous with its dolphin show, cancelled its performances. Since then visitors have been able to sit and watch the dolphins as they are simply taken care of by staff. Now, the aquarium is considering retiring their eight bottlenose dolphins altogether and is in talks to create the first ocean-side dolphin sanctuary in the US. Its decision was based on regular polling of visitors; it learned that people no longer felt comfortable with the show.

“Our audience has evolved,” Aquarium CEO John Racanelli told Baltimore Magazine. “Baby boomers grew up on Flipper, but millennials grew up on Free Willy and The Cove. They are interested in these animals being treated more humanely.”

Others are following suit. This September, the Clearwater Aquarium in Florida announced it would also end animal shows, choosing to focus on rehabilitation and marine resources instead. When asked by the Guardian if SeaWorld would ever consider a similar move, the company said the terms “retire” and “sanctuary” are misplaced in the context of animal care. But added: “The short answer is no.”

I think it’s very telling that Baltimore’s National Aquarium based its evolutionary leap toward the future on polling its own visitors. Presumably SeaWorld is regularly polling its audience as well, and I wonder what those surveys are saying (maybe that info will turn up in one of the imminent shareholder lawsuits).

Despite insisting that Blackfish is having no impact on its business, SeaWorld continues to invest heavily in a PR counter-attack on Blackfish and the former trainers who appear in the film.

It’s latest minute-by-minute critique of Blackfish was perhaps the most detailed, and most tediously off-base, critique it has issued yet.

Below you will find the Blackfish production team’s rebuttal. What’s notable is that SeaWorld continues to massage and manipulate the facts even as it tries to accuse Blackfish of mis-representing the facts. What’s also notable is that SeaWorld continues to try and distract and divert from the core issues raised in Blackfish about the wisdom and morality of killer whale captivity, without ever directly addressing those issues.

I guess we can keep going round after round on this, but the facts simply are not on SeaWorld’s side. And it seems clear that the public is beginning to understand a very different, more credible, and increasingly troubling version of killer whale captivity than the narrative SeaWorld has been promoting for the past 50 years.

Over the weekend, The Dodo posted a short article I put together on how the effort to maintain sparkly, clear water in SeaWorld’s pools can affect the physical well-being of the animals (and the humans who used to swim with them).

It’s not the biggest issue with captivity, but is a perfect example of how every little thing can impact the lives of the orcas and other marine mammals:

It is indeed true that great effort is made to maintain the water at just the right temperature and salinity for the animals. What is not mentioned is all the chlorine that is used to keep the water clear and sparkling (you can’t see Shamu clearly in a murky pool), and free of algae and bacteria. (Don’t even get a killer whale trainer started on what it looks like after a killer whale defecates in the pool, or produces any other bodily emissions.)

A number of former SeaWorld trainers I have spoken with about water quality have noted that captive killer whales routinely have mucus streaming from their eyes — an apparent protective mechanism that is considered “normal” at SeaWorld.

We may talk about animal rights, but animals in fact have no legal rights. The NonHuman Rights Project is determined to change that, and win basic “personhood” rights for nonhuman animals, and has now filed its first lawsuit, on behalf of a chimpanzee named Tommy. Similar lawsuits will follow this week:

This morning at 10.00 E.T., the Nonhuman Rights Project filed suit in Fulton County Court in the state of New York on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee, who is being held captive in a cage in a shed at a used trailer lot in Gloversville.

This is the first of three suits we are filing this week. The second will be filed on Tuesday in Niagara Falls on behalf of Kiko, a chimpanzee who is deaf and living in a private home. And the third will be filed on Thursday on behalf of Hercules and Leo, who are owned by a research center and are being used in locomotion experiments at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

The lawsuits ask the judge to grant the chimpanzees the right to bodily liberty and to order that they be moved to a sanctuary that’s part of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance (NAPSA), where they can live out their days with others of their kind in an environment as close to the wild as is possible in North America.

Establishing some semblance of legal rights for animals is the new frontier for “animal rights,” and potentially the most powerful strategy possible to change the way in which humans relate to animals. Much more on the lawsuits being launched this week here.